A coherent understanding of low-energy nuclear recoils in liquid xenon

Abstract

Liquid xenon detectors such as XENON10 and XENON100 obtain a significant fraction of their sensitivity to light (<10 GeV) particle dark matter by looking for nuclear recoils of only a few keV, just above the detector threshold. Yet in this energy regime a correct treatment of the detector threshold and resolution remains unclear. The energy dependence of the scintillation yield of liquid xenon for nuclear recoils also bears heavily on detector sensitivity, yet numerous measurements have not succeeded in obtaining concordant results. In this article we show that the ratio of detected ionization to scintillation can be leveraged to constrain the scintillation yield. We also present a rigorous treatment of liquid xenon detector threshold and energy resolution. Notably, the effective energy resolution differs significantly from a simple Poisson distribution. We conclude with a calculation of dark matter exclusion limits, and show that existing data from liquid xenon detectors strongly constrain recent interpretations of light dark matter.

19 pages, 10 figures, minor revisions

References in corpus (7)

• The RAVE Survey: Constraining the Local Galactic Escape Speed
• First Dark Matter Results from the XENON100 Experiment
• Results from the First Science Run of the ZEPLIN-III Dark Matter Search Experiment
• Simultaneous Measurement of Ionization and Scintillation from Nuclear Recoils in Liquid Xenon as Target for a Dark Matter Experiment
• Annual Modulation of Dark Matter in the Presence of Streams
• First limits on WIMP nuclear recoil signals in ZEPLIN-II: a two phase xenon detector for dark matter detection
• Observation of Anti-correlation between Scintillation and Ionization for MeV Gamma-Rays in Liquid Xenon

Cited by in corpus (16)

• Constraints on Dark Matter from Colliders
• Results from a Low-Energy Analysis of the CDMS II Germanium Data
• DARWIN: towards the ultimate dark matter detector
• A Next-Generation Liquid Xenon Observatory for Dark Matter and Neutrino Physics
• Interpreting Dark Matter Direct Detection Independently of the Local Velocity and Density Distribution
• XENON10/100 dark matter constraints in comparison with CoGeNT and DAMA: examining the Leff dependence
• Loop-induced dark matter direct detection signals from gamma-ray lines
• Nuclear recoil energy scale in liquid xenon with application to the direct detection of dark matter
• A Review of Basic Energy Reconstruction Techniques in Liquid Xenon and Argon Detectors for Dark Matter and Neutrino Physics Using NEST
• Light Higgs Boson, Light Dark Matter and Gamma Rays
• Light neutralino dark matter with a very light Higgs for CoGeNT and DAMA/LIBRA data
• Statistical coverage for supersymmetric parameter estimation: a case study with direct detection of dark matter
• Determination of responses of liquid xenon to low energy electron and nuclear recoils using the PandaX-II detector
• Importance of upgraded energy reconstruction for direct dark matter searches with liquid xenon detectors
• Detection and Calibration of Low-Energy Nuclear Recoils for Dark Matter and Neutrino Scattering Experiments
• Dark matter pair associated with a $W$ boson production at the LHC in next-to-leading order QCD